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In an arthouse spin on the Old Dark House subgenre, Simon Rumley’s The Living And The Dead takes us into Longleigh, a decaying English mansion inhabited by a decaying aristocratic family – patriarch Donald (Roger Lloyd-Pack), his bed-ridden wife Nancy (Kate Fahy), and their mentally challenged, highly unstable schizophrenic son James (Leo Bill). As Donald struggles to keep the family and its ancestral estate from falling apart, he’s forced to travel to London in hopes of selling the place, leaving Nancy in the care of a nurse and making sure James knows how many of his overwhelming collection of pills he’s to take, and where his injections are in case he starts to feel out of control. Of course, James immediately begins underdosing, misdosing, overdosing and, as a result, flirting with psychological collapse. Things take a turn for the worse when he decides that, as the "man of the house", he’s going to nurse his mother back to health, in doing so proving to his parents that he’s a capable human being and caregiver (!).A sense of immediate dread permeates when James shuts out his mother’s homecare nurse and takes the phone off the hook. He then feeds her fistfuls of random pills ("The more you take, the quicker you’ll get better mummy!"), bathes her in frigid, filthy water after she soils herself, and terrorizes the frail woman between hallucinations and amphetamine-induced dementia spells. The film evolves into a surreal barrage of sometimes violent, quasi-existential nightmare sequences that ultimately leave the outcome up to the viewer – which, any way you slice it, isn’t pretty.

The Living And The Dead’s isolation and increasing tension, coupled with the building’s flaking, elongated passageways (shot in and around Tottenham House, in Wiltshire, England) recall Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, but comparisons end there. A furious editing technique in particular has James traversing the estate’s many stairs and lengthy hallways in a manner that Darren Aronofsky and Shinya Tsukamoto would: fast forward, flash-cut and set to abrasive music entirely out of place for a quiet, aging manor. It’s an interesting approach that injects a frenzied fever into a dusty old horror concept.

—Jovanka Vuckovic

'Excellent...A powerful film which firmly establishes Rumley as a talent to watch'- AINT IT COOL